


Offering

by oceansinmychest



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: F/F, One Shot, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 04:20:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15283515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: Vera bestows Joan with a gift: a letter.





	Offering

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, I enjoy promoting Suffering. May you also enjoy this.

In this den of sterility, an office demanding professionalism yet yielding to the temptation of midnight decisions, Vera Bennett finds herself. On her way to becoming Vinegar Tits, she has yet to be fully committed to the starring role.

Instead, Vera clamps her hands before her trim waist, the door locked shut behind her. She’s come a long way. Her deputy maintains a newly found rectitude. Though she stands at (eager) attention with her shoulders no longer slouched, her posture _close_ to perfect somehow falls short.

“Yes, Vera?”

In her chair, the Governor sits rigid. She’s a bronze statue, her expression as impasse as her response.

“Did you get it?” Vera asks, her tone as wistful and bright as the first signs of spring.

God looks up from the CCTV screen. Her slender, neatly folded hands come to rest in her lap. Her machinations never sleep. For now, Smith is put on the backburner.

To which, Joan falters. By a meager tilt of her head, she studies Vera. Judge, Jury, and Executioner weighs on her actions, her intentions. The silence rivals radio static.

With the utmost certainty, Joan acknowledges that Vera is referring to the paper bird stowed away in her desk on top of the pencils that mark Spiteri’s undoing.

It’s a bit of origami that her sworn right hand felt the need to deposit on her desk at precisely five AM. Creation compels the desire to share. Difficult to imagine Vera folding the paper to bits, to pieces. She’s a strange woman with strange tastes.

Her leather wristwatch interrupts the deafening silence with its persistent tick, tick, _tick_. The sound triggers Vera’s nerves which rest in a bundled knot in the pit of her stomach.

“I did.”

Joan nods.

Such an ennui response.

She’s a deadlock woman.              

“No,” Vera insists while she fidgets, faltering between two selves: the assertive Vera she wants to be and the docile Vera that she is. She squirms on the spot. Clarification follows. “I mean, the letter inside.”

It takes two weeks for a woman like Vera Bennett to fall in love. Hard and fast. Judging by the way her smiles unfurl and her eyes glitter, she has.

She’s written the letter at least a dozen times. Practiced until her wrist began to ache. Every rejected ball had been pronounced rubbish. This comes from the heart. 

In accordance with her grand master plan, Joan underestimated Vera. She straightens her pencils - uniform, yellow-bellied soldiers that they are. It strikes a chord. Her body turns to ice, to stone. 

Crowned by her father’s failed ambitions, Joan switches off that part of herself: the part that cares. She refuses to allow for this emotional instability to bestow her deputy with the gift of opportunity.

“Yes,” the Governor lies.

Vera clings to hope, her eyes wide and searching. Joan loathes the look, but she admits that’s what attracted her to Vera in the first place.

Frozen stiff, Vera expects a response and her pining, rabbit heart hopes for praise. Foolish Vera couldn’t see past her craving. She longs and she yearns. She could never unlock the dead spots of Joan’s heart.

There was no “good job, Vera” or “thank you, Vera.” She couldn’t understand - couldn’t **decipher** \- the sentiment. What did it _mean_? A pledge for Vera’s undying, unwavering loyalty, but it was also a request, a desperate need, to connect. A glitch of a woman can’t appreciate these things.

Koschei purses her lips. There are no spells to be cast, only another order to be obeyed.

 “Were you not responsible for the patrol of H Block?”

Like a stone, her heart sinks. An exaltation of breath follows. Vera exhales rather audibly. She blinks and appears to snap out of a trance. Her cheeks flush. A quick nod suffices. Shame alongside obedience make her more tolerable.

“ _Oh_.” That’s the faulty tune of disappointment. “Yes, Guv’na.”

Starved, Vera aspires to linger. The hardened stare of her superior urges her to leave. Pivoting on heel, she excuses herself. This is what a battered heart looks like. A wounded bird takes flight.

Anticipation makes her sick. Doe’s legs quiver. Her throat begins to close. When she leaves, she finds herself bleary-eyed. Stupid. _What did you expect?_ Vera chastises herself. Mum’s words, not hers. 

She’ll harden herself. Get as prickly as a hedgehog or a porcupine or some other sort of animal with a soft underbelly - the kind she’s seen in a nature documentary when she’s unable to sleep.

Like salt water on steel, this dismissal eats away at their relationship. The compulsion to touch - to hold, to caress, to consume - is squashed. Squandered. With a swallow, Joan represses these urges and awaits the familiar click of her door.

From her desk, she procures the offering in question. A dab of handsanitizer sterilizes her hands. One droplet will taint the ink contained within this miniature sculpture.

Aside from Jianna, aside from Anderson, this scrap of paper may be the one thing that isn’t _defiled_ within the prison complex.

With precision, Joan dissects the ornamental bird. An ugly duckling aspired to be a swan, judging by its wilted beak. A surgical dissection commences, the wings now peeled back by the blunt tip of her eraser.

Once torn asunder, the paper reveals a message. Each letter loops and curls, indicative of childish infatuation. Vera possesses quite the fantasy, dreaming of romance. She views Ferguson as the closest thing to God, albeit a beautiful rendition.

A Morning Star that never quite fell.

At last, Joan reads the letter, but she never discusses the message within. The tip of her manicured nail traces every word. She memorizes it verbatim: the place where it is safest to keep.

Mechanically, she refolds the paper now trampled and flattened by her ruinous touch. She folds it into pieces. Neat, geometrical squares that satisfy her innate perfectionism.

Ferguson tucks it away for safekeeping, confined to her pocket until she ventures home where a lonely goldfish swims in mindless circles. She preserves the letter by sealing it within a frame. The piece rests in her dining room alongside the tokens of art, the fencing equipment, and the old memento of her father.

Neither woman mentions the offering. It seems forgotten like an ill-fated artifact and overlooked on the night of their misguided dinner. Dining alone, Joan gazes at the piece as if it were a blueprint or a map to compassion.


End file.
